by Eva Hoffman
The Inner Lives of Cultures
Counterpoint
Headquartered in London and working with an international network of associates, Counterpoint is a research and advisory group that focuses on the cultural dynamics of risk. Cloud Culture was developed in association with The British Council, the UK’s international cultural relations body
This book is available to download and re-use under a by-nc-sa Creative Commons license ported to UK law. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work, and make derivative works, in a non-commercial context, as long as you credit Counterpoint and the author and share the resulting works under an equivalent license. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ This electronic version of the work does not include the glossary in chapter 10. This is included in the print version of this document (ISBN 978-0-95682-250-5), by kind permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. Also in chapter 10, ‘Unwritten rules’, draws on the author’s paper, Unwritten Rules: How Russia really works, published by the Centre for European Reform, May 2001, https://www.cer.org.uk/pdf/e246_unwritten_rules.pdf. The chapter also draws on an article forthcoming in the journal East European Politics and Societies.
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Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction, Eva Hoffman
1. Barbarism, Civilisation, Cultures, Tzvetan Todorov
2. Brazil, Nicolau Sevcenko
3. China, Shu Sunyan
4. Egypt, Hamed Abdel-Samad
5. India, Pratap Bhanu Mehta
6. Indonesia, Azyumardi Azra
7. Iran, Ramin Jahanbegloo
8. Mexico, Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo
9. Romania, Carmen Firan
10. Russia, Alena Ledeneva
11. Uzbekistan, Hamid Ismailov
Acknowledgements
It was a privilege to be asked by Dr Catherine Fieschi, Director of Counterpoint, to work on the ‘Inner Lives’ project; and a pleasure to work on it with the Counterpoint team. I am grateful to Catherine for her unfailing collegiality and energy during our collaboration. Great appreciation is due to Nick Wadham-Smith, Deputy Director of Counterpoint, who was involved at every stage of work on the conference in Brussels, and who is responsible, with Eve Jackson, Counterpoint’s researcher, for the production and co-editing of this book. My warm thanks also go to Claire Llewellyn, for her courtesy and efficiency in helping to coordinate the conference during her tenure as Communications and Project Manager at Counterpoint.
Introduction
Eva Hoffman
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, what does it mean to talk about relationships between cultures? What, indeed, is meant by ‘culture’? How do we conduct cross-cultural conversations which lead to mutual understanding, rather than its opposite? And – perhaps most saliently – what do we need to understand about each other in the first place in order to talk across national and cultural lines? These were some of the underlying questions which prompted a conference entitled ‘The Inner Lives of Cultures’, from which the essays in this collection emerged. That conference, convened in Brussels in 2010, by Counterpoint and its director, Catherine Fieschi, was part of a larger project by the British Council, to rethink its mission of cultural relations.
This, clearly, is both a daunting, and a most worthwhile undertaking. Cultural exchanges are perhaps more central to our dealings with each other today than ever before; in a sense, they are a basic part of the realities we inhabit. For one thing, issues of cultural identity – understood in ethnic, or religious, or historical terms – are often in the forefront of contemporary political discourse, and sometimes, of conflict. But also, we live in a world in which various kinds of cross-national movement – migrations, travel, various kinds of both enforced and voluntary nomadism – are ever on the rise; and in which flows of fast communication are multidirectional and constant. If we are to meet with each other on the basis of trust rather than tension or insidious indifference, we need to have ways of getting acquainted with each other which are more than cursory, or purely instrumental. But how can this be accomplished? What kind of knowledge is needed to feed meaningful cross-cultural contacts?
In considering such matters, we held two assumptions to be self-evident: that within our intermingled and simultaneously multicentred globe, it is no longer possible to think of cultural relations in terms of promoting ‘our culture’ abroad, or exporting culture from a few privileged centres to the putative peripheries; rather, we need to envision cultural exchange as a two-way – or perhaps even a multidirectional – process, which happens through dialogue and mutual participation, and which hopefully leads to reciprocal and fertile forms of engagement. And second, that our definition of culture needs to include not only the articulated and formal expressions of literature, or music, or artistic artefacts – important as these are – but that whole fabric of social forms and meanings which constitutes the lived and daily experience of culture.
At the same time, we also started from an awareness that on that broader plane, dialogue is hardly easy or straightforward; and that the kind of insight and comprehension it calls for does not come automatically or instantly. These days, we do not lack information about other societies and countries – although that information often comes in sound bites, and confines itself to the current moment. But to enter into the subjective life of another culture – its symbolic codes, its overt beliefs and implicit assumptions – requires, as any immigrant or nomad can tell you, a considerable effort of consciousness and imagination; a kind of stretching of self towards the other, and a gradual grasp of differences which are sometimes imperceptible and subtle.
Of course, cultures are neither static nor monolithic organisms – they are complex, changeable and internally diverse; indeed, the speed of change is a major fact of cultural life today. And yet we each come into a specific culture; and each culture gives us our first existential map, so to speak, and our earliest templates for the basic elements of experience: what constitutes personhood, what is beautiful or disturbing, how family relationships are structured, or how happiness is envisioned. It was the formative lesson of my own emigration (to be personal for a moment) that culture is not only something outside us, that we use or respond to; rather, culture exists within us, and it constructs our consciousness and subjectivity – our perceptions, ideas and even feelings. Different cultures may have varying predispositions towards not only moral values, or forms of group affiliation, but towards different states of self – say, the degree of self-sufficiency or interdependence which seems desirable; how much spontaneity or self-control is valued; whether it is intensity or serenity which feels good, or cognitively consonant. What is considered healthily assertive in one culture may be seen as aggressive or hostile in another; certain kinds of personal disclosure which may seem quite unproblematic in one society may be seen as embarrassing or entirely unacceptable elsewhere. Cultural attitudes can inform not only the obvious parameters of behaviour, but very particular social forms and rites – and even responses which may seem purely physiological. For example, within an admittedly minor anthropological niche of alcohol studies, it has been discovered that not only are drinking habits different in different cultures, but that people experience inebriation in quite various physical ways.
Such deep values, or literally incorporated
beliefs, can be very surprising or perplexing from the outside – partly because they are often taken as given, and therefore remain unarticulated from within. But it is such deep values that I think we need to understand in order to engage in cross-cultural relations which are more than superficial. How, then, can we talk to each other across such differences – how can we come to know each other better, or collaborate in ways which are productive and possibly creative? I think it almost goes without saying that openness and mutual respect – a recognition, on the part of each interlocutor, of the other’s legitimacy and dignity – is a prerequisite for cross-cultural dialogue; without that, nothing much can happen. But it also seems to me that a full and rich engagement calls for something more risky and entangled – something closer perhaps to the process of translation. Like literal translation, cross-cultural back and forth requires a simultaneous receptivity to the other’s subjective language, and a strong sense of one’s own. And like literal translation, it calls for a kind of cross-checking between the two ‘languages’ or forms of sensibility – keeping conscious of what needs to be understood about each other, as well as alert as to what we don’t understand. In order to grasp another culture’s inner life, we need to develop some empathy for its tonalities and textures, its expressive palette and affective norms. At the same time, one’s original language has to retain some stability as a point of reference: a place from which to speak, and to make oneself intelligible to the other. As in textual translation, we need to acknowledge both the correspondences between the two languages – and the differences. Indeed, if dialogue is to be more than a synonym for a palliative exchange of niceties, it needs to include the possibility of disagreement. Moreover, just as there are sometimes untranslatable fractures among texts, so I think it has to be recognised that some differences in the language of values may be unbridgeable, or non-negotiable. In confronting these, it seems to me it is neither salutary nor sufficient to collapse one’s own cultural identity, or idiom, into ‘the Other’ – to delegitimise oneself, so to speak, in the name of concord or good manners. For one thing, to give up on one’s own convictions or perceptions too readily, is to lose the vantage point from which differences can be perceived in the first place. But also, a superficial accommodation to beliefs one doesn’t really agree with violates the dignity of the other, as well as one’s own. One wants to give one’s interlocutor the respect of truthfulness – however tactfully expressed – and the possibility of an equally truthful response, whatever risk this incurs.
But more often, I believe, cross-cultural dialogue can lead to a kind of interweaving of languages – to a discovery both of difference, and of underlying similarities, or who knows, perhaps even certain human universals. After all, just as textual translation would not be possible without some shared linguistic structures, so we could not understand our cultural differences without having some commonalities from which to communicate across them – some shared language of subjectivity. In all these ways, I think, dialogue is central to our understanding of ourselves and the world. It is increasingly recognised, by thinkers in fields ranging from multicultural theory to psychoanalysis, that we become who we are by entering into and participating in webs of conversations, narratives, interpretations of our situation, or stories about our past. Cross-cultural conversations especially can change and enlarge those who are engaged in them. It can make the participants conscious of where they are coming from, so to speak – of their own unspoken assumptions and internalised values; but it can also increase our awareness of others – and the range of possible human aspirations, ways of being, visions of the good society or the good life. And what can be more exciting or interesting than that?
